The New Road

South Carolina

Lori was right, it was South Carolina, not North Carolina. Though I'll be damned if I know the difference.

Anyway, it was a great trip. Probably the best I have ever had to North, er, South Carolina to spend time with Mom and Carlos. Seeing Scott, Joni and their kids was amazing. Those kids are awesome, full of life, and really well balanced for teens and pre-teens. It was also great to see Thom and Jen, though Thom and I didn't get a chance to geek out on our 17" PowerBooks as I had hoped. But you can't have everything. Seeing the other families there was great as well. I wouldn't mind spending more time with Sarah and Tom, they are fun and their kids are really cool. I think Martha would make a great baby sitter for Megan.

On the downside, being the picture boy was draining. The first day I took over a thousand pictures and just sifting through it and processing all of it was a lengthy process. The first day was a bit much, after than I reeled it back to about 500 a day on average. Still, it's an awful lot to go through. Uncle David, who is a professional, came in for a couple of days and I think he took a couple hundred or so in all with his Nikon D70, and had about 50 good ones. I reckon that in all I took about 2500 shots and came away with about 250 keepers. So his ratio of one in four is much better than my one in ten.

I wouldn't mind doing the picture thing at the next family reunion thing (which is coming up really soon now), but I think it would be better if people gave me their memory cards in addition to my own. I'll always be the guy who takes the most shots in a room, but I almost never take the best shots in the room. So I could probably reel back my trigger finger a little more if I knew that other people in the room were taking pictures and that they would let me copy them. Plus, I think I need to be more assertive about posing folks. David did really well mainly because he could get people to stand up, move to a nice spot, and pose for a picture. Where as I usually operate on the sly, trying to get the candid shot here or there. That works, but sometimes posing is good too.

Some tips about taking tons of pictures over multiple days:

• Download often. This will keep the count of images you have to preen lower.
• Preen after you download. By which I mean; remove out of focus shots, and then try to reduce it to just the best shots and move those off to a best of the day (or however you are organizing) folder.
• Come up with an organizational system in advance. I did it by days. I would recommend against doing it by subject (person, etc.) though I advise that if there are multiple discreet events during the day that you sub-categorize by that.
• Get a processing workflow going that takes the images all the way from raw to publication, or almost publication. For me, I download the shots and clean the card. Then I rank all of the photos just on a first pass with one star, meaning keep or throw away. In focus and reasonably well composed, I keep, otherwise, toss. Then I export the panoramic pictures for external processing and delete them. Then I take the remaining pictures and rank them from 1 to 5 in a slide show. Above three will make it into Shutterfly. Then depending on how many pictures I have I will pick a number that means 'web publish'. Then I crop and adjust anything that will go out for prints or on the web, which is usually three stars or above. I then take those pictures and drop them into the daily folders that I use to publish. And that's it. With all that out of the way I can go back to taking more pictures.
• Share your memory cards, or preferably, just get access to other people's memory cards. This way you can take less pictures and enjoy the event.
• Pass the camera around. Easily the best shot from the whole trip was a shot that Thom took of Megan with my camera.
• If the point of the photo isn't abundantly clear then use the comment feature in your software to add a notation about what the picture is about. You will make it a lot easier on yourself if you download more often as well. If you don't do this you are likely to throw away pictures that were meaningful but aren't obvious or well composed.

Hope those help. I also recommend Digital Photography Hacks. I met the author in person. Great guy and he knows how to make the best of even the simplest digital camera.